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ABC

Obama: I’m more of a moderate Republican than a socialist

During an interview with Noticias Univision 23, the network’s Miami affiliate newscast, Obama pushed back against the accusation made in some corners of south Florida’s Cuban-American and Venezuelan communities that he wants to instill a socialist economic system in the U.S. The president said he believes few actually believe that.

“I don’t know that there are a lot of Cubans or Venezuelans, Americans who believe that,” Obama said. “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.”

Blowback

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This won’t change any minds here. To be a socialist on HA, apparently, all you need to do is favor some level of taxation for the purposes of alleviating the affects of poverty.

To an actual socialist, of course, America is still firmly in the hands of the bourgeois, as Marx himself identified welfare states as a co-opting of labor demands for the purposes of immunizing the state against actual revolution.

Remember, folks, socialism requires every factory, farm, and service provider in this country to be owned by the state. If someone isn’t advocating that, they aren’t advocating socialism.

Well, according to the Political Compass, our major candidates and Presidents at least over the last 12 years have all been in the same quadrant and often range fairly close together. Of course, there’s a large amount of variance within that when you break down the q&a that they come to get the results.

Right, because moderate Republicans believe in class warfare, wealth redistribution, socialized medicine, a gutted US military, refusing to pass a budget, and crony capitalism. Yeah, Obama would’ve fit right at home with the likes of George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.

Obama doesn’t. How many people that had “moderate Republican” policies in the 1980s and have them today took a detour in the 1990s to join the Socialist New Left Party, as Barack Obama did when he became a member — at the age of 35, so it wasn’t some “youthful indiscretion” — on 11 January 1996?

This won’t change any minds here. To be a socialist on HA, apparently, all you need to do is favor some level of taxation for the purposes of alleviating the affects of poverty.

To an actual socialist, of course, America is still firmly in the hands of the bourgeois, as Marx himself identified welfare states as a co-opting of labor demands for the purposes of immunizing the state against actual revolution.

Remember, folks, socialism requires every factory, farm, and service provider in this country to be owned by the state. If someone isn’t advocating that, they aren’t advocating socialism.

ernesto on December 14, 2012 at 11:46 AM

Which is why I call him a fascist. And not everything needs to be owned by the state for it to be socialism. That is communism. And don’t bother with the “true communism means the state withers away” garbage.

While I disagree with you, fascist is still a more apt description than socialist. And while you may, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the distinction between socialism and communism, you know enough not to call Obama a socialist, which is good enough for me.

Remember, folks, socialism requires every factory, farm, and service provider in this country to be owned by the state. If someone isn’t advocating that, they aren’t advocating socialism.

ernesto on December 14, 2012 at 11:46 AM

No, it doesn’t. Not every business in Cuba or Venezuela is owned by the state. The Chinese government doesn’t own every business in China, but it controls them. Democratic Socialism is marked more by intensive regulation than outright ownership, which is more along the lines of corporatism. In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the state owned businesses in all but name only.

Remember, folks, socialism requires every factory, farm, and service provider in this country to be owned by the state. If someone isn’t advocating that, they aren’t advocating socialism.

Ernesto, really…that’s not how it works and you ought to know that. Americans would not buy it when presented that baldly and those who espouse socialism know it full well. They figured out a century ago that the only way to fundamentally change America would be to take over from the inside, bit by bit, baby steps to socialist statism. That’s where we’re headed, and it’ll be a fait acompli before many have even realized it’s happened.

Remember, folks, socialism requires every factory, farm, and service provider in this country to be owned by the state. If someone isn’t advocating that, they aren’t advocating socialism. ernesto on December 14, 2012 at 11:46 AM

Remember, folks, socialism requires every factory, farm, and service provider in this country to be owned by the state. If someone isn’t advocating that, they aren’t advocating socialism.

ernesto on December 14, 2012 at 11:46 AM

Actually you have to systematically destroy capitalism and get a majority of the people hook on government in order to go the next step. Every policy this man puts forward is meant to handicap the capitalist system and get people on the government dole. Every policies! So he’s a naked socialist.

If what you say is true (which it isn’t), you are still asking me to believe that bourgeois capitalist forces are actively implementing a system that will eventually revoke their wealth and class status.

The proletariat does not run things here. You’d think that would be obvious given the state of unions alone, not to mention actual levers of power.

While I disagree with you, fascist is still a more apt description than socialist. And while you may, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the distinction between socialism and communism, you know enough not to call Obama a socialist, which is good enough for me.

ernesto on December 14, 2012 at 11:53 AM

So you’re happy with a fascist president? I’m not.

Communism = everything is owned by the State
Socialism = some means of production is owned by the State.

This is a dangerous man. He knows what he is doing. He is on a campaign to redefine what a moderate conservative is. He is winning folks. Everyone mocks him, but he is winning the argument with Americans.

Socialism is simply a phase of economic development, identified by Marx, characterized universally as the social ownership and co-operative management of the means of production. There is no social ownership of the means of production in this country, and no one has suggested it, either through revolution or democracy.